It has become a common item of retail commerce to sell packages of labels which have adhesive attached to their back surface. Such adhesive-backed labels are typically mounted on a backing sheet, which is coated with a release coating, so that the labels can be peeled off of the backing sheet for use. Such labels have many common uses for office and personal organization, for communication and for correspondence, and for coding and product labeling in manufacturing and industrial environments. In addition, labels can be made for many fanciful or amusement purposes, including fanciful labels for use by children. Many kinds, styles, and variants of such labels are currently sold at retail in the U.S.
One aspect of the marketing of labels is that often the packaging for the labels can actually exceed the cost of the goods sold within the package. It has become increasingly uncommon for loose items to be stocked and sold in the modern retail sales environment. Products such as labels must therefore either be boxed, or packaged, in some way so as to be in convenient units which are resistant to tampering by consumers, and which include within the unit enough product so as to be marketable at a price worth the cost of inventory and stocking of the units in a retail establishment. Thus, the two most typical current ways for packaging labels for current retail sale are in boxes and in shrink-wrap packaging. Both the costs of a box to sell labels in, and the cost of appropriate shrink-wrapping or other seal plastic wrapping of labels, can approximate or even exceed the actual cost of the labels within the package themselves. In such a case, the cost of the packaging is disproportionate to the total cost of the labels, as compared to the cost of packaging to the cost of other goods sold at retail. In other words, for labels sold at retail, the consumer pays a disproportionate cost for the packaging, as opposed to the cost of the goods which they are purchasing.
Various systems have been previously suggested for covering adhesive-backed labels with clear plastic layers, for a variety of purposes, usually related to protection of the label from wear or further destruction. For example U.S. Pat. No. 3,854,229 discloses a transparent plastic film located on the label which is intended to be relaminated over the label, so as to protect it from the environment or from later marking. Name tag label systems have been described, such as in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,159,586 and 4,204,706 which use multiple layered systems, including a transparent overlayer, which is intended to be placed over a name tag after a name is written on it. The purpose of the transparent label is to prevent further alteration of the name tag once the individual's name has been written on it. No system is currently known for packaging labels for retail sale to the consumer which does not incorporate extraneous and unneeded packaging materials which approach the cost of manufacturing of the labels themselves.